Novial/Hound Lesson 1

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The subject and object forms (e.g English I and me) of Novial pronouns are the same:

me – I, me

nus – we, us

vu – you (one person)

vus – you (more than one person)

lo – he, him

los – they, them (all male)

la – she, her

las – they, them (all female)

le – he or she, him or her

les – they, them

lu – it

lus – they, them (all sexless objects)

Notice that in the third person, male and female have the endings -o and -a respectively. The ending -e indicates either male or female without specifying. The ending -u indicates a sexless thing. Plurals all end in -s. Les is conveniently used to mean they, them as in English, i.e. it is not specified whether they are sexless or not, and they may be any mixture of male, female and sexless things. This system is flexible and allows more speakers to follow their natural language habits. So the French may often choose to use las and los, while most English speakers would choose to use les, ignoring the sex distinction which is here absent in English. A Finnish speaker may prefer to use le (he or she), since the he/she distinction is absent in Finnish. The pronoun le is also very convenient to say he or she using a single word and avoiding sex bias.

The standard word order is, as in English, subject-verb-object, so the object need not be marked to distinguish it from the subject:

me observa vu – I observe you

vu observa me – you observe me

The personal possessive adjectives are formed from the pronouns by adding -n or after a consonant -en. This is in fact the genitive (possessive) of the pronoun so men means both my and mine (of me):

The plural of a noun is formed by adding the ending -s (-es after a consonant) and the definite article li (the) is invariant as in English:

li probleme – the problem

li problemes – the problems

For convenience de li (of the) is usually shortened to del and likewise a li (to the) to al and da li (by the) to dal. There is no indefinite article (a, an) in Novial. This causes no ambiguity as seen in English when the plural indefinite article (some) is dropped:

hunde – dog, a dog

hundes – dogs, some dogs

The indication of sex in the third person pronouns with the endings -e, -o and -a is also used with nouns that have natural gender:

doktore – doctor (male or female)

doktora – female doctor

doktoro – male doctor

hunde – dog

hunda – bitch, female dog

hundo – male dog

siniore – sir or madam

siniora – madam, Mrs

sinioro – sir, Mr

siniores – ladies and gentlemen

home – person

homa – female person (adult or child)

homo – male person (adult or child)

homes – people

Many sexless nouns also end in -e and these of course cannot change the ending to indicate sex differences.

All adjectives end in an -i, which may be dropped if easy to pronounce. Adjectives usually precede the noun that they qualify. As in English, adjectives do not agree with their noun in number or gender: